The present invention relates to the retrieval of video information and provides a method and a medium for recording video information that make it possible to retrieve video information quickly.
With the ever-increasing processing speed and capacity of computers, database systems and presentation tools capable of handling video information such as is recorded on movie films, videotapes, etc. have lately attracted considerable attention. However, it requires a lot of time and labor on the part of a user to retrieve desired pieces of information individually from a huge amount of video information and process the retrieved pieces of information. Accordingly, techniques to aid users in such retrieval and processing by using computers have been made available. For example, a technique, “Method of automatically compiling indexes and method of searching objects in color video images,” has been reported in the Transactions of Information Processing Society of Japan, Vol. 33, No. 4; and, another technique, “Method of detecting change points in video,” has been disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 4-111181. In accordance with these techniques, video is automatically divided into scenes, and a table of the first images of the scenes is prepared and stored. By using the table as if it were the index of a book, the retrieval and the editing of the video can be facilitated. According to these techniques, because the user can grasp the contents of video in a table at a glance, any scenes searched for can easily be found. In addition, because video is handled scene by scene, the video can easily be edited roughly, or scene-wise.